da tomāto

8.22.13 Thursday. Pissed off Turned computer on, booted, logged in, few minutes in, hardly started - nothing running really - when it restarted by itself. It booted ok. I didn't log in but clicked "restart" instead so it can fix itself. It, again, booted ok; logged in, saw prompt re:"recovered from serious error" report - typical report when it restarts itself. Then a few, maybe two, minutes later, it froze. Manual restart -- error, can't boot, system32 config missing, repair with os disk, etc. Manual restart again -- nada, no post: fan on, cpu light on; but no beeps, no display. Repeated off/on attempts produced same results: fan runs, no beeps, no display. No joy. (The man told me later that I shouldn't have kept turning it off/on. I'll keep that in mind next time.) Reminds me of last year but without cmos error: October 2012 cmos battery change and hardware cleaning when we discovered the mobo's bubbled capacitors. Recommendation back then

Two days of non-stop rain and we have floodwater in our street -- the water was high enough to get in part of our garage this morning but it went down before noon. Other places are sadly, badly affected: impassable roads, flooded homes, motorists needing rescue, households moving to emergency shelters. It's still raining right now but very lightly. They're calling this storm, Maring. It's dark, rainy and gloomy.

oh, was so happy because my package from amazon.com arrived. compared to my past experiences with their expedited international shipping, in 2009 and 2010 , this latest purchase and philippines delivery was -- wow! timeline/details: * july 30, tuesday - ordered one cd-rom (game) sold by another seller but "fulfilled by amazon" with expedited international shipping. * august 6, tuesday - package delivered by dhl. hurrah! that's only five business days . excellent. the total expedited international delivery cost increased to include a separate "import fees deposit" of $4.18 -- this showed up during checkout. it was most probably added when they switched to dhl (i remember my previous packages went through a local receiving company). and this time, tracking was available: i knew when it left the states and when it arrived in manila; i knew that it was out for delivery as early as monday morning on august 5 but it was raining badly then so i assumed th